Year of Impossible Goodbyes by Sook Nyul Choi

tell each other at school. Hours went by. Suddenly I remembered Mother would be waiting for us. I was so excited to see Unhi that I had completely forgotten. I went and got Aunt Tiger, and we rushed home. Just as we had imagined, Mother was standing by the gate, looking down the road. She scolded us, but was happy to hear about our visit with Unhi and her mother. I went to sleep that night thinking of the many nice surprises in store for me.
    The next morning, as Inchun and I were watering the garden, the gate swung open. In walked Unhi and her mother. I had told Unhi where we lived, but she hadn't said anything about coming by. Her mother asked to see my mother. While they visited, I showed Unhi my garden. Inchun followed us everywhere. Unhi kept staring at him. "Is he mute?" she finally asked. "How come he never says anything? What a strange one!"
    Inchun just grinned, and I ruffled his hair. If Unhi only knew how clever and wise he was. Unhi looked at us and said, "Yeah, well, like I said that first day I saw you, you're a funny one, too." Then Unhi told us that after we left the night before, she and her mother went to check the secret storage compartment in the basement and found it full of sacks of rice. They came to us today to ask for our help in attributing the rice to the rest of the townspeople.

    Kisa worked all day disttibuting the sacks of white rice. Mother and Aunt Tiger could not take their eyes off our bag. "It must be a good ten pounds," said Mother. "I haven't seen that much rice in my home since the Japanese arrived. We'll have to make a special dinner tonight."
    "We must divide the rice into smaller bags and put them in a cool dry place," added Aunt Tiger. "That way, the bugs and mice won't get at it."
    As Aunt Tiger rushed around to find small bags to store it in, Mother smiled to herself and whispered to me, "Your Aunt is pretending that we ate back in the old days when we had a roomful of rice to keep for the entire season. This sack won't he around long enough to go bad or get eaten by mice." But she just watched Aunt play with the dainty grains of white rice, putting them into small bags and tying them carefully.
    Aunt Tiger learned from a neighbor that two of Unhi's brothers had come back from a Japanese labor camp and were very ill. Unhi's Mother came to talk to Mother a few days later and told how her boys had been forced to dig ditches sixteen hours a day under the hot sun and the pouting rain. They survived on potato roots and some mixed grains. The Japanese soldiers often amused themselves by forcing the boys to drink their own urine. She cried as she recounted these terrible stories.
    The dreams of a happy future together in a free land were shattered. The whole town was transformed into a hospital. Many men and boys came home only to die. There were many funeral processions every day, and wailing and sobbing filled the air. It was as if all the sadness and misery that had to go unexpressed for the past thirty-six years had been unleashed. "I don't know which is better, not to see my boys and cling to the hope that they are alive and healthy, or to have them come home so sick that I have to watch them die," said Mother to Aunt Tiger.

    The next day, we heard that both of Unhi's brothers had died. I saw Unhi's mother in the funeral procession, dressed in the traditional burlap funeral gown, and behind her, I saw Unhi. Unhi's mother was wailing, and pounding her chest as if she wanted to die and join her sons. But I couldn't take my eyes off Unhi as she walked behind the two coffins and rubbed the tears from her eyes. That dull burlap funeral outfit made her look like a dying old woman. I felt like a million years had gone by since that day when we had talked so happily at her big house. How quickly our world kept changing.
    Kisa kept checking the train station hoping to see the sock girls, my brothers, Father, and Aunt Tiger's husband. One day he came running home and said, "We'd better lock